Blog and website for William Rubel, author and cook specializing in traditional cuisines

White Head, like many other cows associated with small Lithuanian farms, spends the warm months in a field tethered to the end of a long rope. A bucket of water and an empty bucket for the milk are left in the field near the cow — and in this case — a milking stool and jar of pork fat are left by the cow as well. The fat is used as a hand-lubricant. This photograph of White Head was taken at the evening milking. It was a brisk August evening, a cold wind blowing, it had been raining a little earlier. We were not the only ones in the field. All around us, though at some distance, I could see women tending their cows. After the milking, which takes some time, we moved the cow to a fresh plot of grass, and she immediately started eating, munching away at the fresh grass as we tuck into a particularly good looking meal.The aspect of life that has impressed me most from my visits to subsistence farms in Lithuania, is milk’s central place in the farm diet. The milk, butter, curds — roughly the cottage cheese of American markets — aged cheese, sour cream, buttermilk, ought to be thought of as a package of foods that inexorably flows from the farm-cow — a package of milk products that is produced in variety, more or less every day.

The production of milk from a cow is a steady thing, morning and night, so milk is always being processed — transformed into products that last longer than fresh milk. On a Lithuanian farm there is always fresh milk, sour cream, sour milk, butter, cheese, curds, and whey, the watery residue left after making curds. Milk and whey are also fed to the pigs, so one form of milk processing is to store it for later use in the form of pig fat.

Each day, White Head, the cow in this picture, produces roughly two buckets of milk — one bucket at seven in the morning, and one at seven in the evening — 10 to 11 liters (10 to 11 quarts). Try to imagine what this is like. Just imagine walking back from the grocery store twice a day with this milk in a bucket. milk back in a bucket, once in the morning and once in the evening. Keep in mind that you cannot ever not pick up this milk — and you cannot ever pick it up at different time — for example, you cannot say, oh, I am having dinner at a friend’s house, I will pick up the milk at 9 p.m. or at 11 p.m., and you cannot say, oh, I don’t feel well today, I have a fever, I need to sleep in, I’ll pick up the morning milk at noon. The milk schedule is immutable.

And, of course, though this is separate from diet, one isn’t just “picking up” the milk. The cow has to be milked, and that takes time. White Head lives just behind my friend Onute’s farm, but I have been to farms where the cow is kept a couple kilometers from the farm house; the cow does not sleep in the field, but is walked to the field early in the morning, and back to the barn in the evening, which adds an hour of walking time, or more, to the milking schedule. And then, too, the milk in the bucket has to be processed a little even before you can do anything with it — it must be strained through a cloth — and ideally cooled. Not only is the farm diet significantly influenced by milk, but a substantial portion of everyone’s personal time and energy goes into maintaining even a single cow.

What interests me is that an external circumstance — owning a cow — determines to a significant extent what these farm families eat. This is so different from how most of us live. We command food resources form all over the world. We never get hour hands dirty. What is for dinner can be decided on a whim.

For me, Onute’s cow, White Head, stands for a life in which the daily cuisine is structured by the life of the farm. More or less everyone knows what they will have for dinner — the diet is drawn from a narrow band of ingredients — milk, potato, rye bread and pig being the cornerstones of the Lithuanian farm cuisine — with eggs and cabbage being examples of secondary seasonal foods. We, on the other hand, eat from more or less randomly selected recipes selected from the world’s cuisines. Even when we stay focused on one broad cuisine, such as “Italian,” we are usually oblivious to the external factors out of which farm-based dishes evolved, and that created a harmonious constellation of dinner-time offerings.

Milk Based Medicines

Medicine for sore throat: Bring a cup of milk to the boil, take off heat, stir in a spoonful of butter and honey to taste.

Medicine against a winter cough: Boil two chopped onions in 2 glasses of water until reduced to 1/2 glass of water. Strain, discard the onions, and set the onion water aside. Separately, boil 1 glass of milk. When the milk is boiled, take off the heat, add the onion water, add honey to taste, and serve.